Tuesday, July 28, 2009

I haven't talked about arena much lately, largely because my 3s team seems to have plateaued at around 1750. We go up, we go down, but we don’t seem to be making any progress towards 1800. But I'm on a 5s team as well, which was started mainly for fun. It's a little bit of a wonky bracket since there are so few teams in it. We never seem to quite know what we'll get, whether we'll hit a team with 1300 MMR or 2000.

Last night we seemed to be in fine form though. We'd won four in a row without much trouble, and then we ran into an arena team that had really good momentum and unfortunately schooled us. They burned down one dps, then another, and finally our last one. They took out the other healer, leaving only me crying in the corner because I hate being the last one left. I like to put up a fight even when we're losing, it's just good practice, but with five on one I couldn't really expect to do much.

Sure my health was full, but I was down to about 15% mana. I probably could get a judgement or an offensive Holy Shock off, but I was fully prepared to get owned in two seconds flat. I wondered if I should just sit there and take it. And then something remarkable happened.

Everyone stopped moving. At first I thought I was lagged, the match had ended, I was dead, and my computer just didn't know better. After all, I was standing still too. Since my healing partner had died in the middle of my cast I'd yet to do anything else. I didn't realize that the only reason that I wasn't moving was because I'd been on the verge of giving up.

Then the other arena team started disappearing. First one faded out, then another. I perked up and on a whim, whacked the nearest guy with my mace. I was moving!

He faded out. What was going on? Was their entire team DCing?

Only the resto druid was left, and she wasn't in tree form. She starting casting...

"Hana," shouted my team leader over vent, "now's your chance! They all dropped out so the last guy could get the achievement!"

And with that, it was on!

I wasn't going to sit around and let some resto druid kill me for an achievement. I have more pride than that! And little did the druid know that my arena pet peeve is getting killed by another healer. It didn't look good with my mana bar being where it was, but I had hope. My teammates were cheering me on.

The druid seemed to think that a Starfire would do it. When it became apparent that I wasn't going to sit there and eat it (we were in the Dalaran Arena and I ran for the nearest set of boxes), she started Cycloning me and winding up Starfires to hit me as soon as they wore off.

I dropped down off the platform to break line of sight. I hit Divine Plea. When she started drinking, I drank too. She stopped drinking to Moonfire me and stop my own drinking. I put up Blessing of Wisdom and start using Judgement of Wisdom to get mana back. Her Cyclone and Starfire weren't working, I'd usually LOS her, but even when she did get me they didn't do enough damage to kill me before I healed. She went into bear form and started attacking me.

I kept healing through everything she threw at me. She popped out to caster form. Our mana bars were even. I'd heard the horror stories of holy paladin versus resto druid and knew that our match could last literally for hours.

No matter what spells she threw at me I always healed to full. I couldn't seem to beat her down below 40% before she'd heal. The winner would be decided through a contest not of our gear and class abilities, not even our skill, but by our determination to win. Whoever gave up first would cost their team the match.

My mana bar was practically full now. Hers was at half. She went into travel form and ran away to drink. I targeted our warrior and started casting Resurrection.

Obviously she couldn't have that happen. I was Moonfired and she ran away again. I tried rezzing our warrior again. She came back and Moonfired once more.

The pressure was on. She couldn't drink for more than a couple seconds or I would resurrect a teammate. I can only assume her Innervate was still on cooldown since she didn't use it. We played cat and mouse hitting each other then breaking away to drink or try to rez, until finally… I pulled it off.

I don't know how, maybe she was starting to give up, but I resurrected our hunter and landed a heal strong enough to keep him from being one shotted by a Starfire. She CCed him with Cyclone, but I stunned her to neutralize any CC advantage she might have had. When our hunter came out of Cyclone I topped him up with another heal, and by then it was pretty much over.

She didn't even tough it out, but quit the match.

My team leader said it was probably to deny me from receiving the Last Man Standing achievement myself, but I don't think I would have earned it anyway since I'd resurrected a teammate.

During the fight my team leader had informed me that the other team was worth a lot of points. I didn't know how much, but when the scoreboard came up it turned out that they lost over 20 points to us. We gained a whopping 19. I'm sure the other team was kicking themselves for dropping out after I was the only one left. I guess they thought I'd given up. Maybe they thought their resto druid could solo a holy pally with 600 resilience and 2000 spell power.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad I held on. We didn't have any other matches nearly as close last night. Indeed, we ended the night having played only the ten matches we were obligated to in order to earn points, and those ten matches were all wins.

I might not have gotten Last Man Standing, but we did get Hot Streak, and I have an achievement hungry druid to thank for it.